Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines.18 Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside—neither of which the sovereign state finds in its interest.19 The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicitous silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance from the historical record.

  History and social science, because they are written by an intelligentsia using written records that are also created largely by literate officials, is simply not well equipped to uncover the silent and anonymous forms of class struggle that [Page 37] typify the peasantry.20 Its practitioners implicitly join the conspiracy of the participants, who are themselves, as it were, sworn to secrecy. Collectively, this unlikely cabal contributes to a stereotype of the peasantry, enshrined in both literature and in history, as a class that alternates between long periods of abject passivity and brief, violent, and futile explosions of rage.

  He had centuries of fear and submission behind him, his shoulders had become hardened to blows, his soul so crushed that he did not recognise his own degradation. You could beat him and starve him and rob him of everything, year in, year out, before he would abandon his caution and stupidity, his mind filled with all sorts of muddled ideas which he could not properly understand; and this went on until a culmination of injustice and suffering flung him at his master’s throat like some infuriated domestic animal who had been subjected to too many thrashings.21

  There is a grain of truth in Zola’s view, but only a grain. It is true that the “onstage” behavior of peasants during times of quiescence yields a picture of submission, fear, and caution. By contrast, peasant insurrections seem like visceral reactions of blind fury. What is missing from the account of “normal” passivity is the slow, grinding, quiet struggle over rents, crops, labor, and taxes in which submission and stupidity are often no more than a pose—a necessary tactic. What is missing from the picture of the periodic explosions is the underlying vision of justice that informs them and their specific goals and targets, which are often quite rational indeed.22 The explosions themselves are frequently a sign that the normal and largely covert forms of class struggle are failing or have reached a crisis point. Such declarations of open war, with their mortal risks, normally come only after a protracted struggle on different terrain.

  RESISTANCE AS THOUGHT AND SYMBOL

  Thus far, I have treated everyday forms of peasant resistance as if they were not much more than a collection of individual acts or behaviors. To confine the analysis to behavior alone, however, is to miss much of the point. It reduces the [Page 38] explanation of human action to the level one might use to explain how the water buffalo resists its driver to establish a tolerable pace of work or why the dog steals scraps from the table. But inasmuch as I seek to understand the resistance of thinking, social beings, I can hardly fail to ignore their consciousness—the meaning they give to their acts. The symbols, the norms, the ideological forms they create constitute the indispensable background to their behavior. However partial or imperfect their understanding of the situation, they are gifted with intentions and values and purposefulness that condition their acts. This is so evident that it would hardly merit restating were it not for the lamentable tendency in behavioral science to read mass behavior directly from the statistical abstracts on income, caloric intake, newspaper circulation, or radio ownership. I seek, then, not only to uncover and describe the patterns of everyday resistance as a distinctive behavior with far-reaching implications, but to ground that description in an analysis of the conflicts of meaning and value in which these patterns arise and to which they contribute.

  The relationship between thought and action is, to put it very mildly, a complicated issue. Here I wish to emphasize only two fairly straightforward points. First, neither intentions nor acts are “unmoved movers.” Acts born of intentions circle back, as it were, to influence consciousness and hence subsequent intentions and acts. Thus acts of resistance and thoughts about (or the meaning of) resistance are in constant communication—in constant dialogue. Second, intentions and consciousness are not tied in quite the same way to the material world as behavior is. It is possible and common for human actors to conceive of a line of action that is, at the moment, either impractical or impossible. Thus a person may dream of a revenge or a millennial kingdom of justice that may never occur. On the other hand, as circumstances change, it may become possible to act on those dreams. The realm of consciousness gives us a kind of privileged access to lines of action that may-just may-become plausible at some future date. How, for example, can we give an adequate account of any peasant rebellion without some knowledge of the shared values, the “offstage” talk, the consciousness of the peasantry prior to rebellion?23 How, finally, can we understand everyday forms of resistance without reference to the intentions, ideas, and language of those human beings who practice it?

  The study of the social consciousness of subordinate classes is important for yet another reason. It may allow us to clarify a major debate in both the Marxist and non-Marxist literature—a debate that centers on the extent to which elites [Page 39] are able to impose their own image of a just social order, not simply on the behavior of non-elites, but on their consciousness as well.

  The problem can be stated simply. Let us assume that we can establish that a given group is exploited and that, further, this exploitation takes place in a context in which the coercive force at the disposal of the elites and/or the state makes any open expression of discontent virtually impossible. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the only behavior observable is apparently acquiescent, at least two divergent interpretations of this state of affairs are possible. One may claim that the exploited group, because of a hegemonic religious or social ideology, actually accepts its situation as a normal, even justifiable part of the social order. This explanation of passivity assumes at least a fatalistic acceptance of that social order and perhaps even an active complicity—both of which Marxists might call “mystification” or “false-consciousness.”24 It typically rests on the assumption that elites dominate not only the physical means of production but the symbolic means of production as well25—and that this symbolic hegemony allows them to control the very standards by which their rule is evaluated.26 As Gramsci argued, elites control the “ideological sectors” of society—culture, religion, education, and media—and can thereby engineer consent for their rule. By creating and disseminating a universe of discourse and the concepts to go with it, by defining the standards of what is true, beautiful, moral, fair, and legitimate, they build a symbolic climate that prevents subordinate classes from thinking their way free. In fact, for Gramsci, the proletariat is more enslaved at the level of ideas than at the level of behavior. The historic task of “the party” is therefore less to lead a revolution than to break the symbolic miasma that blocks revolutionary thought. Such interpretations have been invoked to account for lower-class quiescence, particularly in rural societies such as India, where a [Page 40] venerable system of rigid caste stratification is reinforced by religious sanctions. Lower castes are said to accept their fate in the Hindu hierarchy in the hope of being rewarded in the next life.27

  An alternative interpretation of such quie
scence might be that it is to be explained by the relationships of force in the countryside and not by peasant values and beliefs.28 Agrarian peace, in this view, may well be the peace of repression (remembered and/or anticipated) rather than the peace of consent or complicity.

  The issues posed by these divergent interpretations are central to the analysis of peasant politics and, beyond that, to the study of class relationships in general. Much of the debate on these issues has taken place as if the choice of interpretation were more a matter of the ideological preferences of the analyst than of actual research. Without underestimating the problems involved, I believe there are a number of ways in which the question can be empirically addressed. It is possible, in other words, to say something meaningful about the relative weight of consciousness, on the one hand, and repression (in fact, memory, or potential) on the other, in restraining acts of resistance.

  The argument for false-consciousness, after all, depends on the symbolic alignment of elite and subordinate class values—that is, on the assumption that the peasantry (proletariat) actually accepts most of the elite vision of the social order. What does mystification mean, if not a group’s assent to the social ideology that justifies its exploitation? To the extent that an exploited group’s outlook is in substantial symbolic alignment with elite values, the case for mystification is strengthened; to the extent that it holds deviant or contradictory values, the case is weakened. A close study of the subculture of a subordinate group and its relation to dominant elite values should thus give us part of the answer we seek. The evidence will seldom be cut and dried, for any group’s social outlook will contain a number of diverse and even contradictory currents. It is not the mere existence of deviant subcultural themes that is notable, for they are well-nigh universal, but rather the forms they may take, the values they embody, and the emotional attachment they inspire. Thus, even in the absence of resistance, we are not without resources to address the question of false-consciousness.

  To relieve the somewhat abstract nature of the argument thus far, it may be helpful to illustrate the kind of evidence that might bear directly on this issue. Suppose, for example, that the “onstage” linguistic term for sharecropping or for tenancy is one that emphasizes its fairness and justice. Suppose, further, that the term used by tenants behind the backs of landlords to describe this relationship [Page 41] is quite different-cynical and mocking.29 Is this not plausible evidence that the tenant’s view of the relationship is largely demystified-that he does not accept the elite’s definition of tenancy at face value? When Haji Ayub and Haji Kadir are called Haji “Broom,” Haji Kedikut, or Pak Ceti behind their backs, is it not plausible evidence that their claim to land, to interest, to rents, and to respect is at least contested at the level of consciousness, if not at the level of “onstage” acts? What are we to make of lower-class religious sects (the Quakers in seventeenth-century England, Saminists in twentieth-century Java, to name only two of many) that abandon the use of honorifics to address their social betters and insist instead on low forms of address or on using words like “friend” or “brother” to describe everyone. Is this not telling evidence that the elite’s libretto for the hierarchy of nobility and respect is, at the very least, not sung word for word by its subjects?

  By reference to the culture that peasants fashion from their experience—their “offstage” comments and conversation, their proverbs, folksongs, and history, legends, jokes, language, ritual, and religion—it should be possible to determine to what degree, and in what ways, peasants actually accept the social order propagated by elites. Some elements of lower-class culture are of course more relevant to this issue than others. For any agrarian system, one can identify a set of key values that justify the right of an elite to the deference, land, taxes, and rent it claims. It is, in large part, an empirical matter whether such key values find support or opposition within the subculture of subordinate classes. If bandits and poachers are made into folkheroes, we can infer that transgressions of elite codes evoke a vicarious admiration. If the forms of outward deference are privately mocked, it may suggest that peasants are hardly in the thrall of a naturally ordained social order. If those who try to curry the personal favor of elites are shunned and ostracized by others of their class, we have evidence that there is a lower-class subculture with sanctioning power. Rejection of elite values, however, is seldom an across-the-board proposition, and only a close study of peasant values can define the major points of friction and correspondence. In this sense, points of friction become diagnostic only when they center on key values in the social order, grow, and harden.

  THE EXPERIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMAN AGENTS

  It was with such issues in mind that I spent more than a year and a half in the village of Sedaka listening, asking questions, and trying to understand the issues that animated villagers during my stay among them. The result is, I hope, a close-to-the-ground, fine-grained account of class relations in a very small place (seventy families, 360 people) experiencing very large changes (the “green revolution”: [Page 42] in this case, the double-cropping of rice). Much of that account, though not all of it, is an account of what appears to be a losing class struggle against capitalist agricultural development and its human agents. It goes without saying that I have thought it important to listen carefully to the human agents I was studying, to their experience, to their categories, to their values, to their understanding of the situation. There are several reasons for building this kind of phenomenological approach into the study.

  The first reason has to do with how social science can and ought to be conducted. It is fashionable in some of the more structuralist variants of neoMarxism to assume that one can infer the nature of class relations in any nonsocialist Third World country directly from a few diagnostic features-the dominant mode of production, the mode and timing of insertion into the world economy, or the mode of surplus appropriation. This procedure entails a highly reductionist leap straight from one or a very few economic givens to the class situation that is presumed to follow from these givens. There are no human actors here, only mechanisms and puppets. To be sure, the economic givens are crucial; they define much, but not all, of the situation that human actors face; they place limits on the responses that are possible, imaginable. But those limits are wide and, within them, human actors fashion their own response, their own experience of class, their own history. As E. P. Thompson notes in his polemic against Althusser:

  nor is it [the epistemological refusal of experience] pardonable in a Marxist, since experience is a necessary middle term between social being and social consciousness: it is experience (often class experience) which gives a coloration to culture, to values, and to thought; it is by means of experience that the mode of production exerts a determining pressure upon other activities…. classes arise because men and women, in determinate productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think, and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are given.30

  How else can a mode of production affect the nature of class relations except as it is mediated by human experience and interpretation? Only by capturing that experience in something like its fullness will we be able to say anything meaningful about how a given economic system influences those who constitute it and maintain it or supersede it. And, of course, if this is true for the peasantry or the proletariat, it is surely true for the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and even the lumpenproletariat.31 To omit the experience of human agents from the analysis of class relations is to have theory swallow its own tail.

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  A second reason for putting the experience of human agents at the center of the analysis concerns the concept of class itself. It is all very well to identify a collection of individuals who all occupy a comparable position in relation to the means of production—a class-in-itself. But what if such objective, structural determinations find lit
tle echo in the consciousness and meaningful activity of those who are thus identified?32 In place of simply assuming a one-to-one correspondence between “objective” class structure and consciousness, is it not far preferable to understand how those structures are apprehended by flesh-and-blood human actors? Class, after all, does not exhaust the total explanatory space of social actions. Nowhere is this more true than within the peasant village, where class may compete with kinship, neighborhood, faction, and ritual links as foci of human identity and solidarity. Beyond the village level, it may also compete with ethnicity, language group, religion, and region as a focus of loyalty. Class may be applicable to some situations but not to others; it may be reinforced or crosscut by other ties; it may be far more important for the experience of some than of others. Those who are tempted to dismiss all principles of human action that contend with class identity as “false-consciousness” and to wait for Althusser’s “determination in the last instance” are likely to wait in vain. In the meantime, the messy reality of multiple identities will continue to be the experience out of which social relations are conducted. Neither peasants nor proletarians deduce their identities directly or solely from the mode of production, and the sooner we attend to the concrete experience of class as it is lived, the sooner we will appreciate both the obstacles to, and the possibilities for, class formation.